voluntaryXchange

Excel Tip # 23: Line Breaks In Formulas

I get asked this a lot, and now it’s a tip: how do I put a line break in a formula inside a cell to make it easier to edit?

The answer is, while editing the formula, use Alt-Enter to put in the line breaks.

There are pros and cons to this.

The pro is that if you like to edit formulas in cells (say by clicking F2), the line breaks are really helpful.

The con is that if you like to edit formulas in the formula bar, only one line will appear at a time. You can scroll through them with the arrow keys, but it can be disconcerting.

Technorati Tags: excel,tip,23,line,break,formula

Lotteries Are Taxes On the Ignorant

Why is this so hard to get?

P.S. I work at a university in Utah, where there is no lottery. I know many professors who drive an hour to Nevada to buy lottery tickets.

Via applied mathemagics.

Technorati Tags: lottery,tax,probability,winning,dying

For My Next Stats Class

I may do this with a Ballantine diagram too:

Via I Love Charts.

Technorati Tags: venn,diagram,cute

Math Atheism

The number of business majors who are math agnostics and atheists never ceases to stun me:

Via applied mathemagics.

Technorati Tags: calvin,hobbes,math,atheism

Domino’s Transshipment Visualized

Two thoughts about this visualization of Domino’s delivery routes:

1) The bicycle deliverer is a piker. I delivered (by car) in the Buffalo suburbs for over 4 years. I covered about 100 square miles of territory, did over 100 miles of stop-and-go-driving on a weekend night, and the suburbanized swampy terrain had very few neat, homogenous rectangles.

2) What a great video for the transshipment portion of a linear programming or Excel class.

P.S. We have a distribution center (one of the red nodes towards the video’s end) for Wal-Mart located about 35 miles south of my home. I recently found out that it’s actually a distribution center for distribution centers: it handles mostly clothing, and ships nothing directly to stores.

Technorati Tags: domino's,pizza,transshipment,delivery,route

My Life

I am going through this with a co-author right now. His vision was to use raw data put out by the NHL. My reality was that this data was over 1,000 observations on over 1,200 games. I went with the script:

Now that it’s done (thanks to Trevor MacDonald) I know I am way out on the right of this chart.

Via I Love Charts.

Technorati Tags: script,geek,nhl

Still Life with Mountain Range and Tennis Racket

Typical of the chart junk of students:

Via I Love Charts.

Technorati Tags: chartjunk,mountain,range,tennis,racket

This Would Have Gotten Me to Pay Better Attention In Trigonometry

Via applied mathemagics.

Technorati Tags: tan,line,tanget,curve

“Reverse Phone Book” for Algebra

I came across an interesting site called RIES. If you give it a number, it returns equations that approximate that number.

Weird, eh? Usually you have a tough equation, and you approximate a solution to it with a number.

For example, I input 42, and RIES outputs these equations that can be solved for x and which yield an answer close to 42:

• x+7=7^2, an exact solution
• 3x=5^3, approximation is accurate within 1%
• (x+5)^2=3*7, , approximation is accurate within 1%
• x^5=8^9, approximation is accurate within 1%
• 5(x+1)=6^3, approximation is accurate within 1%

An odd thing for someone who isn’t a mathematician: this is sort of like a reverse phone book for algebra.

Via I Love Charts via the details in the fabric via XKCD.

Technorati Tags: reverse,phone,book,algebra,ries

A Joke for Coders

Test your code before it matters. This goes for your spreadsheets too … if you didn’t’ think they count as “code”.

Technorati Tags: excel,test,code,production